Public support for animal rights goes beyond keeping dogs out of overhead bins

Author

Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

Disclosure statement

Garrett Broad has consulted with the Nonhuman Rights Project on a volunteer basis. The Nonhuman Rights Project provided funding for the survey described in this article, but the author did not benefit financially from this arrangement.

For me, Kokito’s tragic death illustrates a broader controversial legal question, not just in the air but on the ground. Whose rights were actually violated in that overhead bin? The human passenger’s – or the dog’s?

Animals as property

U.S. law treats humans as the only animals considered “legal persons” capable of having rights. It designates all wild and domesticated animals, by contrast, as “legal things.” Pets and farmed animals alike are a form of property – by definition, they have no rights of their own.

There has been considerable legal and philosophical debate on this topic. Some legal scholars see no reason to change the status quo, arguing that animals are best protected through welfare regulations and anti-cruelty statutes that focus on how people treat them. A number of other activists and scholars, such as Harvard University’s Cass Sunstein, insist that it’s time to break down the legal barrier that separates humans from animals, calling for a limited set of animal rights that must be respected by the law.

To gauge public sentiment on this question, I worked with Qualtrics, a market research and survey company, to poll 1,044 Americans. These people were nationally representative in terms of their age, race and ethnicity, gender, income and region. The survey had a 3 percent margin of error.

About nine in 10 Americans, according to my survey, support some form of legal rights for animals. Nearly half believe that animals deserve the exact same rights as people. Only about 5.5 percent said they thought animals need little to no legal protection at all.

This survey is only the latest indication that support for the rights of animals is strong.

A 2015 Gallup poll, for instance, found that about one in three Americans believed animals should be given the same rights as people, up from one in four in 2008. Both times, Gallup found that only 3 percent supported largely denying animals any rights at all.

Legal personhood

The group’s legal efforts, however, haven’t focused on dogs like Kokito. Instead, it has advocated on behalf of animals like Tommy and Kiko, two 30-something male chimpanzees who spent most of their lives as film performers and in roadside zoo cages.

The Nonhuman Rights Project argues that great apes should be the first animals transformed from “legal things” into “legal persons.” They point to chimpanzees’ scientifically demonstrated autonomy and their high level of emotional and cognitive complexity as the basis for this argument.

To clarify what the public actually thinks of granting these types of legal rights to chimpanzees and other autonomous animals, one survey question provided this background information:

“Some people believe that new laws should be passed that give certain species of highly intelligent animals – including great apes, elephants, and cetaceans like whales and dolphins – the legal right of bodily liberty, which would guarantee them freedom from imprisonment. Supporters of these laws want to remove animals from places like zoos, circuses, and research facilities and relocate them to sanctuaries and other protected nature reserves instead.”

Then, respondents were asked how inclined they would be to vote in favor of such a law or vote for a politician who supported it.

About half of the people taking part in my survey said they agreed with the Nonhuman Rights Project’s goals, while only one in five opposed them. Women and Democrats were the most likely to strongly favor these ideas. Few other clear patterns regarding differences of opinion emerged based on ethnic background, region, education level, income or religion.

Despite the dominant culinary habits of Americans, public opinion polling and the uproar following Kokito’s untimely death aboard a United Airlines flight both point to how people want to see a world that grants animals significant legal protections. Many Americans even appear open to the idea of granting legal personhood to certain animals.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the rights of animals will ever become guaranteed by U.S. law.